Rather than try and improve handicapping skills or come up with clever betting schemes...most punters could improve their punting results by a minimum of 30% if they they improved their decision making in each race.

Decision making is what comes after you have analysed a race, sorted your contenders and understood what the market is telling you.

Identify the right situations to play and the situations to avoid betting is the single most important factor to punting sucess.

Just because you like a horse and think it will win, thats no reason to back it. Just because your price says $3.50 and the market say $3.80 or $4.00, that is no reason to back a horse.

There is always a much broader context and scenario you are faced with in each race, some are good to bet and others are not so good. Spending time learning how to identify these situations and make appropriate decisions is the key to winning and most importantly knowing that you can do it year in year out.

Spend time on this element of your punting skill and your results will dramatically improve, almost overnight. A good place to start is to go back over your winners (assuming you keep records) and look at the scenarios you were presented with in those races. How did your horse(s) stack up against other contenders? was it your top pick? how big was its advantage? How did the market have the race? Who was the favourite? How did you assess that horse? What about the other market challengers? What did you feel about the overall race? There are numerous other questions.

The principle is that one of the best ways to identify the good situations to play in is to review the situations where you have enjoyed success in the past. Sooner or later a pattern will emerge and you will start to get a good feel for when it is 'right' to launch in and bet. Next time you are confronted with that situation you will know and bet with confidence. Focus on those situations in betting and your results will improve.

ALternatively, you will also get a feel for the times when you are confronted with a situation that hasn't proven historically successful, regardless of how much you liked the horse.

The difference between the punter who battles losing a small amount each year (if they are honest with themselves) and the punter who consistently wins each year is not necessarily handicapping skill or some clever betting plan...the successful punter is skilled and ruthless in identifying which situations to bet in and which situations to leave alone.



[ This Message was edited by: osulldj on 2003-11-25 21:34 ]